Philip Larkin

ISBN-13: 9781845190002 / Angielski / Twarda / 2004 / 208 str.

Stephen Cooper

Opis

Critics have tended to label Larkin s poetry as sexist, racist and reactionary. However, this volume demonstrates that Larkin s artistic impulse throughout his career was to challenge orthodox models of social and sexual politics. Focusing on the Brunette Coleman novellas and the unfinished novels, a structural blueprint is identified as prefiguring the later poems commentary on sexual and social conduct. Further unpublished material includes correspondence, workbook drafts, dream records, and a playscript, depicting, alternately, hostility to wartime heroics, revulsion from capitalism, unease with traditional gender roles and an interest in psychoanalysis. This study makes available to scholars paintings by Larkin s friend, James Sutton, which illuminate the writer s concern with social oppression, especially the predicament of women in the 1940s. Philip Larkin: Subversive Writer is a fresh and revealing study on Larkin s artistic subversion; stylistic and thematic, it reveals the underlying themes of Larkin s entire oeuvre."